In the beginning of the movie our protagonist Jack starts of being a bit of a boring man and a workaholic. He’s a man in his thirties, not particularly muscular, constantly looking tired and he’s working a lot but without much commitment. That’s one of the side effects when you, like Jack have a sleeping disorder, also called insomnia. therefor when he’s awake he is not attentive because of his lack of sleep. He dresses like any man with a office job with shirt and tie and is summed up not anyone you would notice if you didn’t know him.
He has an obsession with buying things from IKEA, and his living room ends up looking like an IKEA catalogue, he’s identifying himself with his furnitures or his kitchen. He’s in the beginning of the movie developing an addiction for going to support groups, to get some relief. He finds out that if he go to the support groups and cry he can sleep at night. Throughout the movie he also develops a second personality, that we in the movie are introduced to as Tyler Durden. In the movie we don’t know that Tyler and Jack are two personalities in the same person.
Tyler is everything Jack wants to be but isn’t. While Jack is a weak and boring person who is very predictable and not able to speak for himself, Tyler is a strong, cool and masculine person, that kind that won’t give up without a fight. He’s a bit of a rebel, that believes that you as a person should be able to think by and for yourself. Not just following the rest of the pack like so many others. The alter ego Tyler want’s to improve Jack, push his limits and become someone more like Tyler. In the movie our protagonist Jack’s thoughts is the speak-over.
Throughout the whole movie we hear his comments and opinions on almost everything. At the end of the movie we find out that Tyler is actually not real, but an alter ego in Jacks head and that makes Tyler another way for us to see how Jack and his subconscious are thinking and feeling. It’s a movie without many head characters. besides Jack there is Tyler, Jacks opposite alter ego, and a woman named Marla singers who Jack meets while going to support groups, She too is a lot different from Jack.
A very straightforward person and a bit masculine and stubborn too. and then there is Bob, a man Jack meets in the support groups. Bob is not stubborn neither masculine, but he’s the first person in the movie that our protagonist gets just some kind of relation to. Bob is way more like Jack than Tyler or Marla, he has a much more anonymous personality and is in most situations not the one to shout out his thoughts. At the end of the movie Jack kills his alter ego after a long fight for his freedom and a life without Tyler.
